A Personal Pot-pourri
of Hofstadteriana

by Glen Worthey

It’s not the task of the Presidential Lecture
essayist to focus on or to draw attention to himself: and I would, of
course, never do such a thing (wink-wink).
No, we’re here to write and read about the Lecturer.
Still, one of the most salient traits of Douglas Hofstadter’s
writing is its deeply and intrinsically personal nature, and not
only because all of his books and nearly all of his essays are written
in the first person (really a rather remarkable thing in itself,
considering that what Hofstadter writes is primarily non-fiction,
although fictional vignettes abound, focusing on what, for most
academic writers, would be basically “impersonal” topics:
artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, literature,
music, art... even his articles on geometry and computer science
are written in the first person). Although this grammatical characteristic
of his writing is certainly no coincidence, Hofstadter’s personal
writing style, his ever-present “I,” has its
roots deeper than mere style: it is deeply inherent in his approach
both to the topics at hand, and to his own thinking and writing
about them. Hofstadter’s “personal” approach allows
us readers to participate in the writer’s journey of discovery
(the path sometimes being at least as interesting and important
as the destination).

All of this is meant to justify my inclusion in this Web site of
this brief personal essay on reading Hofstadter — specifically,
on my reading of Hofstadter. I don’t make any claims
to being a particularly good reader, whatever that might
mean. (I personally know several people who are much better readers
of Hofstadter than I — and know of a good number more.)
I certainly include myself in the “generation of readers”
(mentioned in the main essay on this site) for
whom GEB was formative “core” reading. But I’ve
also chosen here to write about my own personal reading of
this most personal writer. Not only in the main
essay, but also in its bibliography
and excerpts sections, I tried to give
a more or less objective overview of DRH’s primary works,
and tried to focus on what seem, more or less objectively, their
most salient aspects. Granted, these aspects seem most salient precisely
to me, and I’m not objective at all, no matter how
hard I try — but that was my goal.

Here, though, I abandon all pretense (or some pretense, anyway)
of objectivity and generality in order to gather a very personal
pot-pourri of moments and mementos culled from my own experiences
reading Hofstadter. I include here various and sundry jewels from
Hofstadter’s writings — not necessarily those that someone
else, including the author, would inevitably consider the most valuable,
of course, but rather those that most sparkle in my own memory.
I also relate a few things that I have gathered from coincidence
(quoting a favorite bard): the coincidence of some particulars of
my life with some particulars of Hofstadter’s work —
again, not because my life is so extraordinarily interesting to
people who don’t know me, but rather as an illustration of
the potential meanings of coincidence, especially in the appreciation
of Hofstadter’s work. Obviously, it’s the Hofstadter
half of the coincidence that will be of most interest to most readers;
but I would hope that other readers of Hofstadter might gather something from
their own coincidences as well.

In the history of metaliterary endeavors, Hofstadter came a little
before Dave Eggers, and a lot after Laurence Sterne. But in my own
reading history, Hofstadter was first by many years. As much as
I love reading the others, in many ways reading GEB was necessary
preparation for reading them, and it remains, in my mind, one of
the measures of the metaliterary. Every bit of the book is fair
game
for Hofstadter’s games, from cover to cover, and table of
contents to index. Some of this metaliterary play is described
elsewhere in this site, and really, there’s too much to mention without
writing another set of books more or less the same length as Hofstadter’s
own oeuvre. Some metaliterary aspects of Hofstadter’s books
are not necessarily purely playful: for example, the multiple tables
of contents in most of his books (Metamagical Themas has three!), each one recursively including the others,
revealing the content of the book in a different degree of detail,
are themselves wonderful pathways into each book; they also act
as various retellings of
their books — a function that seems obvious now that Hofstadter
has developed it so nicely for us.

Although Hofstadter’s metaliterary aspects are both entertaining
and enlightening, as I point out elsewhere, they
seem to be relatively rare in the non-fiction world. Of course,
Dave Eggers's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, one
of my favorite books of the last several years, is also non-fiction
— although of that fiction-like narrative genre of autobiography.
Still, Eggers the writer of belles-lettres and Hofstadter
the cognitive scientist and philosopher stand, somewhat oddly,
very close together in the bookshelf of my mind. I even sometimes
like
to use the checkbox Eggers provides in his title as a sort of scorecard
for the books I read, and both he and Hofstadter pass with flying
colors: Genius? Check. Staggering? Check. Work? Check.
Heartbreaking? Check. “Why even bother with a book
that doesn’t live up to these tests?” I ask myself rhetorically.
Well, of course, there are lots of useful, entertaining and enlightening
books to read — but it’s the ones that meet this standard
— initially set for me by Hofstadter, later enunciated by Eggers
— that end up as my favorites.

There seems to be no end to the metaliterary moments to be found within
Hofstadter’s major works. Self-ref and self-rep, jokes
and giochi, and so on and so forth — one could create an entire typology! And of course Hofstadter does so, since
the “meta” idea, far from being only icing on his cake, is also one of its main ingredients.
As I hope to have portrayed throughout this site, a significant
part of the pleasure of a Hofstadter book for me is discovering
all these hidden
treats gracing the surface and baked inside his cakes. (I also
hope not to have spoiled some future reader’s appetite for them by pointing out too many!)
But there is even some delicious metaliterary play to be found
somewhat outside the books — perhaps, after devouring both cake and icing of a book, discovering these meta-metatextual
moments is like licking the icing from a beater.

One of my favorite
examples is in three parts — and in verse, no less! In brief: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin begins with a poem of dedication to his friend and fellow poet Petr Pletnev,
which Hofstadter of course translates. But in typical metaliterary
fashion, Hofstadter begins hisnovel versification just outside the Pushkin text, with his own poem of dedication (identical to
Pushkin’s in rhyme scheme and meter,
of course) to his friend and fellow Onegin translator James Falen! This is a brilliant example of “the subtle art of transculturation” (as Hofstadter titles one of his chapters in Le Ton beau de Marot): not only is there a perfect analogy drawn between the dedicatees; there is
also a deeper metatextual analogy drawn between Pushkin’s “haughty set” (in Russian “гордый свет” — which happens to rhyme with Hofstadter’s English, by the way), the imagined audience Pushkin doesn’t aim to amuse, and “Nabokov’s monde,” the imagined audience of that Nabokovian sort of “translation” with which Hofstadter justly finds fault. That’s one extra rich layer in this particular cake, but there’s more. In response to an unfortunately prominent review of his Onegin translation, Hofstadter wrote the following gem:

To the editor:

I write to counter Richard Lourie,
Who tried to trash my Pushkin verse,
“Eugene Onegin.” In his fury,
He called it “flat,” and even
worse,
He claimed my English was deficient,
My Russian weak and insufficient —
Quoting my own disclaimers as
His proof my poem lacks pizzazz.
I have to question why a critic
Would crudely crow, “There’s
not a line
That sings or zings,” yet quote but nine
From o’er five thousand. Such acidic
But feckless words to flout my rhymes
Did not well serve The
New York Times.

Sincerely,
Douglas Hofstadter
Stanford, California.

Now, there are at least few things to note about
this response: First and form-most, it is written as a precise
and strict Onegin stanza — obviously a metatextual move in itself. Second, it includes a few carefully-aimed
guilt-by-association rhymes, notably “Lourie / fury” and “acidic / critic.” Third, it rather fairly sums up all two of the reviewer’s rather flimsy criticisms — fairly enough, anyway, that I don’t feel any need to quote much of the review itself, though
for the record, it’s in the Times Book Review of September 12, 1999, where Hofstadter’s response appeared on October 12 of the same year. The only potentially substantive
idea in this review (most of which falls squarely in the de gustibus realm) is about mistaking “the word-game surface aspect of poetry — alliteration
and wordplay — for the thing itself.” This old fallacy, that “the medium is not the message,” is closely related precisely to the topic of the next section of this
essay; but to finish this section, I would just point out that
the beauty of Hofstadter’s response is in precisely its unity of medium and message, and that his poetic
expression is clearly the meta part of valor.

Hofstadter
contra Addison

Continuing in this “meta” mode, I wanted to clarify
that I find Hofstadter’s use of play (metaliterary play, wordplay,
genre play, and so forth) to be marvelously meaningful. But it should
be said right away that not all, and perhaps not most, find this to be the case for wordplay in general. I believe it’s common to declare
that “serious” writing should be “serious,”
and pointedly not playful. Hofstadter gives the lie to this
rather stodgy old commandment. After I first encountered (reading
LeTbM, of course!) the idea of the lipogram
(a composition written with some letter-level constraint, such as
without any E’s) in Le Ton beau de Marot, I
looked for other evidence of the mysterious form. The OED
entry for “lipogram” took me first to Addison’s
Spectator, and the following harsh judgment of the lipogram
and some of its brethren:

As true Wit generally consists
in this Resemblance and Congruity of Ideas, false Wit chiefly
consists in the Resemblance and Congruity sometimes of single Letters,
as in Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipograms, and Acrosticks; Sometimes
of Syllables, as in Echos and Doggerel Rhymes; Sometimes of Words,
as in Punns and Quibbles....[2]

Of course,
it’s hard to pick a fight with a writer of Addison’s stature,
and I suspect the fight would not really be with him alone, but
rather with an entire literary aesthetic or even with an entire epoch.
Still, Addison himself offers a subversive example of the possibilities
of “false Wit” a few lines later, as he divides the
literary sheep from the “falsely witty” goats: “Mr.
Dryden is very sparing in it,” he writes of false wit.
“Milton had a Genius much above it. Spencer
is in the same Class with Milton. The Italians, even
in their Epic Poetry, are full of it.” Perhaps it takes a
particularly colloquial reader of our day to appreciate the true
Wit of this double entendre, but I suspect even Hofstadter, a
known Italophile, would agree: yes, perhaps the Italians are
full of it — thank the gods!

Related to this love of form at all levels — including even
such lusty dalliances with form, like wordplay and letterplay, that some (Mr.
Addison) might consider beneath them — is one of the
most memorable central ideas of Le Ton beau de Marot: that
formal constraints, paradoxically, often prove to be paths to higher
artistic achievement. Rhyme and meter are obvious examples of these
artistically “liberating” constraints; and Hofstadter
would point to the contemporary victory of free verse, even —
especially! — in poetry translation, as evidence of the general
decline in the ars poetica. But there are other sorts of
art-inspiring, mind-liberating formal constraints as well, including
all those oddities in which Hofstadter takes such great delight
(see the note on Oulipo, below, as well his lipogrammatic
autobiography and his two strikingly different versions of the
story of old One Stone / Einstein).

When Hofstadter embraces the theory and practice and importance
of formal constraints, he’s in very good company: one of my
favorite LeTbM anecdotes (pp. 538-539) is in praise of poetic
constraints, and comes through Hofstadter from Willis Barnstone,
a translator of Borges who worked in Buenos Aires with the poet
himself. Barnstone relates a memorable lesson he learned from
the master, related to rhyme and to formal constraints in general: “try
a little harder.”

“Borges has a message for you about the sonnets,”
the editor said.
“What’s the message?”
“In your translation of ‘Camden, 1892,’
the one about Whitman,” [the editor] said discreetly,
“Borges thinks your rhyme in the last couplet is incorrect.”
I wondered why Borges hadn’t called me himself.
Why the messenger? I began to fumble with words, defending slant
rhymes, saying how modern poets in English like to use muted
assonant rhymes, how...
“Borges thinks you should try a little harder,”
[the editor] coldly interrupted.
So I tried a little harder. I discovered it was not much
harder to make rhymes perfectly consonant. And this achievement
had advantages beyond that of euphonious final vowels. Each
new formal obstacle orders the imagination to look a little
farther and opens escape from the map of the literal and the
obvious.

Perhaps not all constraints are created equal. Perhaps not all constraints
are equally important in all genres, or for all authors, or in all
works. Addison surely understood and appreciated the constraints of
rhyme and rhythm, somehow distinguishing between the very syllables of false-wit
(doggerel) and true-with poetry. Surely this topic deserves a
more nuanced treatment: it can’t be as simple as Hofstadter
contra Addison. But to my mind, and in my limited experience,
Hofstadter’s position is the more productive. And fun.

Mind as Kunstkammer, Hofstadter as Hoflieferant

Of the many possible metaphors for the mind,[3]my favorite for my mind is the cabinet of curiosities.
I guess I’m fond of “big ideas”; in spite of a
distressingly short attention span, I enjoy meaty books and substantial
pieces of music and long historical periods. But for me there’s
nothing quite like trivia (and even less like quadrivia): the curious
bits of knowledge from the human endeavors I care most about.
I
don’t mean baseball statistics or World War II battles or
the names of the British prime ministers — not that I have anything
against these things, but they don’t delight the way these
odd snippets of knowledge that I’m calling “curiosities”
do.

Curiously, over the years, as the occasional conversation or book
review or sound or sight causes me to recall some curiosity within
my private little Kunstkammer, and then to trace the source
of that curiosity in my head — curiously, a quite significant
portion of times, that source has been one of Hofstadter’s
books. I don’t know whether this is a matter of similar tastes
(though I certainly know of some divergence in our tastes); or some
measurable abundance of these sorts of things in Hofstadter’s
work (though one certainly couldn’t say this was the primary
purpose of any of these books — one certainly wouldn’t
call them miscellanies); or the consequence of my not having read
enough other books in my life (perhaps getting closer to
the truth) — but I know that many of these favorite little
things I read first, or learned most memorably, in Hofstadter. Here’s
a sampling:

Bach self-referentially encoded his name as the melody B-A-C-H,
both rather slyly in A Musical Offering (one of the central
texts of Hofstadter’s GEB) and more directly in the
final Contrapunctus of his Art of the Fugue. In
Contracrostipunctus, one of the most masterful and masterfully
playful dialogues of GEB, Hofstadter has his principal
characters, Achilles and the Tortoise, expound memorably on this
curiosity, on its relation to Bach’s biography, and on the
endless possibilities of hidden messages in music, poetry and
— of course — dialogues. (I won’t risk a spoiler
by commenting further on this most delicious dialogue —
but I do encourage you to read or/and re-read it! It’s on
pages 75-81 of GEB.) This, though, doesn’t nearly
exhaust the possibilities of the B-A-C-H melody for Hofstadter:
he later reveals a simple intervalic transformation through which
B-A-C-H becomes C-A-G-E — with diverting digressions, both
metaphysical and musico-critical, on these two “related”
composers.

Bach’s Crab Canon (Musical Offering)
is the same played backwards and forwards, with the voices reversed. (I suppose all
crab canons do this, but Bach’s is the first I’d ever
heard of.) Of course, M.C. Escher’s Crab Canon engraving,
and Hofstadter’s own Crab Canon dialogue (GEB,
pp.199-203), in which the other two Crab Canons are discussed,
do somewhat the same thing; most amazingly, certain long stretches
of crab
DNA do sort of the same thing too! Hofstadter isn’t too
shy to reveal both his devices themselves and, later, the creative
processes that led to this lovely constellation of playful formalisms
and hidden meanings. These become the source material for an
important later discussion of human and computer creativity
(GEB,
pp.665-668) — but it is the backwards-forwards-reversible property (in other words, the crab-canonicity)
of Bach’s
Crab Canon that first delighted me and stuck in my mind.

Umberto Eco and Humbert Humbert are isomorphic. The real-life
Italian novelist, medievalist and semiotician was born in 1932,
and had his first publication in 1956. Echoing his first name,
as literally instructed by his surname, he becomes “Umberto
Umberto”; translating that into English gives us Humbert
Humbert. The fictional European scholar and pedophile was born
in 1910 in the fictional world, but first revealed to our world
in 1955, as the main character of Nabokov’s Lolita.
The two coincide, Hofstadter points out (Le Ton beau de Marot,
p. 127), when Eco writes a preface to a book of lipogrammatic
Italian sonnets, the last of which is a retelling of Lolita.
¡Olé!

Fascinating Literary Formalities. Through Hofstadter’s
books, particularly Le Ton beau de Marot, I first learned
of the Oulipo writers and their curious linguistic and literary
antics: Raymond Queneau and his mathematical and Bachian Exercises
de Style, Georges Perec and his e-less lipogrammatic
novel La Disparition, and others. I also heard here first
of Vikram Seth and his Silicon Valley-set, Onegin-versed
Golden Gate — that “one novel in verse that
doffs its hat to another,” as Hofstadter memorably put it
in Ton beau de Marot (p. 234). This menagerie of literary
curiosities (and let this designation never be called a denigration!),
together with some slightly more canonical but still deeply curious
works from Borges, Lem and others that are included in The
Mind’s I — and of course a sampling from the imaginary
Egbert B. Gebstadter — would
form a delightful and quirky book club program, for example, or
a well-stocked literary Kunstkammer.

The Last Shall Be First, Part I: e-Commerce. I conclude this
inventory of my mental cabinet of curiosities with two wildly
contrasting Hofstadter “firsts” — one which
is perhaps frivolous, though certainly significant in certain
realms; and another which is profoundly esoteric and deeply
meaningful.
Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
on May 10, 1995, became the first book ever sold over the Web
by that symbol of the Internet Age, amazon.com.[4]
In addition to being a nice note in the sales history of a very
deserving book, as well as a handsome feather in amazon.com’s
e-commercial cap, this is also perhaps a bit ironic because of
Hofstadter’s eschewing of “glib technological glitz
and surreal futuristic promises” (GEB, Twentieth
Anniversary Ed. Preface, p. P-22). Not that amazon.com is necessarily
glib, glitzy, surreal or futuristic — but there has been
more than a hint of each of those aspects in its history. And
Hofstadter and team’s wonderful book was an unwitting yet
proud part of it all!

The Last Shall Be First, Part II: A Fractal Found.

Hofstadter’s 1975 Ph.D. dissertation in physics, The
Energy Levels of Bloch Electrons in a Magnetic Field, describes
and illustrates one of the first ever fractal phenomena found
in nature —
more particularly, the first fractal phenomenon that ever cropped up in
physics, and as the energy spectrum of a very
ordinary-looking equation, where no one ever would have guessed that
anything like this would turn up.
When he graphs the energy levels described in the title, a fantastically
beautiful butterfly pattern emerges, its nested, recursive forms
repeating endlessly on many different levels, so that each piece
contains copies of the whole. What Hofstadter originally called
Gplot is now popularly and fondly known as “Hofstadter’s
butterfly,” an important contribution both to solid-state
physics and to the aesthetic appreciation of the beauty, simplicity
and harmony of the universe. Hofstadter describes the basic
structure
and meaning of his Gplot in GEB, pp. 138-142.

Pushkin-Pullkin

To understand the next ingredient in my pot-pourri you need
to know that I studied Russian literature in graduate school, before
coming to Stanford as a librarian of digital things. A few years
after coming to Stanford, in 1999, I attended conference here in
honor of the bicentennial of Alexander Pushkin’s birth. As
a Slavist, I had of course known it was Pushkin’s birthday,
and was interested in the conference. What I hadn’t known
until then, and really couldn’t have imagined, was that Douglas
Hofstadter was going to appear at the Pushkin conference —
and moreover, was presenting his freshly-minted translation of Eugene
Onegin! (In the many-year flurry of graduate school reading
and writing, I had missed Hofstadter’s books of the 1990s;
had I read Le Ton beau de Marot, of course, I wouldn’t
have been quite so surprised at the appearance of EO. A little
surprised, sure — as Hofstadter says he was himself! —
but not head-spinningly so, as was actually the case.)

During the few days of the conference, I heard Hofstadter read
from and discuss his new translation of the foundational work of
Russian literature. I bought a copy, and stood in line to have it
signed. Another surprise awaited me there: instead of just signing
the book, Hofstadter proceeded to draw this crazy picture on the
fly-leaf! It only took him half a minute or so, and I couldn’t
make heads or tails of it, representationally speaking. (Even without
heads or tails, I did notice the little whiskers.) Since this was
the first time I’d ever seen or communicated with him at all,
I knew this wasn’t a special gift for me, and I presumed this was
just the way he signed his books — though it seemed like a
lot of effort as I imagined the number of books he had probably
signed! I only learned recently that Hofstadter’s “Jazz
Scribbles” period had begun only a few years earlier (see Hofstadter’s
own description of
his Jazz Scribble practice — and note the constraints and
lessons he draws even from this seemingly random artistic act).

As much as I enjoyed my own personal Jazz Scribble in my own signed
copy of Hofstadter’s Eugene Onegin, what really moved
me at the time was the very fact of that translation, which I took
as a gift to me and the whole Russian literature profession, from
a famous writer in a totally different field who had inspired me
so much in my late adolescence: after all, he could have chosen
to translate Don Quixote (Pierre Menard’s version,[5] of course!),
or The Tale of Genji, or something else instead — but he chose our novel in verse! This sense
of gratitude only increased as I read the translation itself, as
I realized what a labor of love it was, and what an interesting
and delightful contribution it made to the appreciation of Pushkin
in the anglophone world.

I had yet another sort of epiphany related to Hofstadter’s
1999 visit to Stanford and contribution to “my” field:
although I hadn’t thought about it in this way before, I suddenly
realized while sitting at this conference that my first academic publication (just a few years earlier),
about a much lesser-known Pushkin poem,[6] was
in fact a deeply and uniquely (if, at the time, subconsciously) Hofstadterian
reading. Once again, Hofstadter had been hovering the background
of my field of study, and suddenly came into view! The gist of my
paper was that Pushkin’s humorous narrative poem “Little
House in Kolomna” — long thought to be a somewhat trifling
jumble of metaliterary references and a bawdy cross-dressing anecdote
— was in fact a poetic fractal, and perhaps one of a kind.
(In the paper I show that Pushkin’s 40-stanza poem serves
as a huge, 8x5 model of each of its own eight-line, pentametric
stanzas, complete with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes
and a cornucopia of other self-referential formal features.) How
I missed that obvious Hofstadterian nature of my own article is
a mystery to me — perhaps it was a forest/trees scenario —
but as I read Hofstadter’s “new” books a few years
after, and have since re-read the old ones, I see how clear the
connection is. I now believe that it was the very same affinities
that I have been trying to illustrate in this essay, and my deep-background
reading of Hofstadter’s works many years before, that made
my own little discovery possible. It’s far afield from Hofstadter’s
butterfly — but in an odd way, not altogether different.

Gratitude and Generosity

There’s always more that I could say about the personal experience
of reading Hofstadter, for example, about working in the very places
he grew up. For some lovely Stanford scenes, I recommend his description
of typesetting and printing the galleys for GEB in the building
where the Stanford Daily was printed. This is in the Twentieth-Anniversary
Preface to GEB. Or his description of learning to program
on, meanwhile “interacting” with, the University’s
only computer in the basement of Encina Hall (in the 2003 article
entitled “Moore’s Law, Artificial Evolution,
and the Fate of Humanity”). It would also be fun
to include here a list of all the ways that Hofstadter and Nabokov are alike, and
how they really should get along better than they seem to (and,
how they too, in the bookshelf of my mind, stand close together).
Or to banter Hofstadter a bit about his sometimes outspoken opinions
of pop culture: he gets a kick out of Cole Porter — and even
relishes the thought that his Eugene Onegin sounds as if
Porter had done it! — yet takes delight (in Metamagical
Themas) in expressing his “heretical opinion” that
John Lennon’s wonderfully silly books In His Own Write
and A Spaniard in the Works are “perhaps better than
the Beatles’ music”!

There’s so much to be found in Hofstadter’s books —
he’s such a generous and genial writer, with such wide-ranging
interests — that this sort of collecting of curiosities, and
recalling of readings, and engaging with the writer — this
pot-pourri of a reading journal — could almost go on
forever, or at least as long as the books themselves. That, though,
would be absurd: that’s what the books are for. If I have
helped you to recall some of your own moments with Hofstadter, or
have inspired you to spend some time gathering curiosities from
him for your own mental museums, then I think my somewhat self-indulgent
personal essay as a grateful reader of Hofstadter will have been
worthwhile.

Notes

1. In an early draft of this essay a curious and punny quote was attached to
this particular section on metaliterary topics. The phrase was
based on an Irving Berlin song in which a cocky smart-aleck of
a character
boasts in song of
her supposed superiority
over her supposedly inferior interlocutor. Well, this quip, based
on the pun “meta” in place of the word “better,” has been attributed falsely to Hofstadter, who rejects that attitude
out of hand and would much rather not be associated with it! Rather
than continue this false association, I’ve chosen a different (perhaps more labored, and certainly less memorable) pun.
If you, dear reader, know or can figure out what the rejected pun
was, please promise never, ever to associate it with Douglas Hofstadter!
And may the meta ban win.